1. Technical Field
The present disclosure pertains to systems, devices, and methods directed to the delivery or service of objects and, in a representative embodiment, to a soccer ball delivery system and devices for highly accurate and reliable service of a soccer ball and related methodologies of implementation and training.
2. Description of the Related Art
Playing soccer well requires a wide variety of skills. Players other than the goalkeeper may use any body surface other than the hands and arms. Skilled players are expected to acquire, at a minimum, a high degree of skill in the use of various surfaces of the feet, legs, chest, shoulder, and head to receive, control, and redirect the ball. A conservative estimate is that 21 body surfaces are routinely trained for use in receiving and directing the ball, not including the hands and arms for goalkeepers.
The ball may arrive from as close as less than a yard or from as far away as 70 yards, either on the ground or in the air, with a variety of speeds and spins. The player may be moving toward, away from, or at an angle to the direction of flight of the ball when it is received. The player may choose any of several actions with each contact (“touch”) with the ball, depending on game conditions: control and retain possession of the ball, dribble the ball to a new location, pass it to a teammate, clear it out of a dangerous area, or shoot it toward the goal. Any of these actions may involve a choice of direction of the ball and the player after playing the ball. Goalkeepers must also master these same skills, plus the use of the hands for catching the ball or parrying it out of harm's way with the fingers or fists.
Each intersection of a body surface, a trajectory of flight including spin, the angle and speed of the player's movement relative to the ball, and the action to be taken by the player, represents one unique skill to be mastered through repetition and training. The entire matrix represented by all relevant combinations of these variables contains many hundreds of skills to be learned. This matrix will be termed hereinafter the “training matrix” for the sport of soccer. Other sports have their own training matrices based on the body or apparatus (e.g., bat) surfaces, trajectories, player movement, and player actions, used in those sports to receive and direct the ball.
Combined, these skills, applied to the player's first contact with the ball, are known in the soccer coaching community as “first touch.” First touch is generally considered to be the cornerstone on which all other skills are built, and a mastery of first touch is the hallmark difference between great and merely good players.
Most of these skills must be executed in game conditions in a split second and, therefore, require not only the physical ability to perform the skill, but sufficient practice that the action is unconsciously selected and performed; that is, it must become a so-called “muscle memory” action. Achieving this level of skill requires many repetitions of performing each individual skill. In the ideal training environment, these repetitions take place in a short period of time.
There are obstacles to achieving these repetitions.
The simplest and most common obstacle is when a training partner is not available to serve the ball. This is a very common limit faced by players, especially youth in the United States.
Another common obstacle is training with a partner or group who are not skilled enough to accurately and repeatably provide the service needed to train the desired first touch skills. This is a problem everywhere in the world and at all levels of age and skill, but especially among young players who struggle with even basic types of service of the ball and, therefore, are not effective training partners for those seeking to acquire a better first touch. However, even highly proficient players encounter this problem for advanced first-touch scenarios. Certain skills require ball service that even the best players struggle to deliver and, therefore, are mastered by few players, not because they are inherently difficult to learn, but because they are difficult to train for lack of consistent, accurate service of the ball.
When a skilled coach is present, often that coach is the only one capable of serving the ball in the manner required, which means the coach's ability to train players is compromised by having to stand far away from the players being trained and focus on serving the ball rather than the actions of the player or players being trained.
Even more centrally, in order to accurately serve balls to a partner, a player must first have acquired a good facility with first touch, which, in a classic chicken-and-egg problem if all players are of roughly equal ability, can only be acquired through repetitions of receiving quality service of the ball that one's training partners are not yet capable of.
Similar problems have been recognized in certain other ball sports and have led to the creation of machines capable of serving a ball to a player. The most prominent examples are baseball, tennis and volleyball. The extension to soccer of the same concept, a machine for training first touch, seems at first glance natural and obvious. However, soccer presents demands that no machine has to date been able to satisfy.
A soccer ball is much heavier than baseballs and tennis balls and modestly heavier than a volleyball. It must travel much faster than a volleyball. As a result, the forces involved in serving a soccer ball are much higher than those for any other ball sport. A soccer ball traveling at 30 meters per second, the speed of an adult international player's fastest service, has approximately 1.6 times the kinetic energy of a baseball pitched at 90 miles per hour. Put another way, the kickback force of accelerating a soccer ball to 30 m/s would be sufficient to knock over backward most transportable baseball pitching machines and would cause others not secured to the ground to “walk” or slide on their legs relative to the ground with each pitch.
Soccer balls must be served from a variety of surfaces, from grass to various types of artificial surfaces including carpeted surfaces. A machine for serving soccer balls must not damage any such surface.
The physical area of service for soccer is tremendously larger than any other sport, as is the range of positions from which the ball must be served.
The variety of speeds and spins that must be applied to the ball is much broader for soccer than for these other sports.
Baseballs must be delivered from roughly the elevation of a pitcher's release point, while soccer balls are ideally served from close to the ground.
Soccer fields are commonly far from power sources and often have no storage facilities, unlike baseball, tennis and volleyball.
Soccer is commonly trained in moist conditions, unlike baseball, tennis, and volleyball; therefore, a machine for soccer must be capable of accurately serving moist balls, not just dry balls.
The various governing bodies of soccer permit a wide variation in the diameters and weights of soccer balls, while balls in other sports are more tightly regulated. Soccer balls are subject to differences, from ball to ball or for the same ball over time, in their internal air pressure, unlike a baseball.
Soccer balls have relatively soft surfaces that are easily damaged, they have hidden seams, and the ball is highly compressible. Baseballs are tough, abrasive, essentially incompressible, and have protruding seams.
The training matrix for soccer is at least two orders of magnitude larger than that of any other ball sport, which implies a much broader set of usage scenarios to support in a machine for serving balls.
These demands, taken together and unique to soccer, pose design and engineering problems not seen in the design of ball-serving machines for other sports. To the inventors' knowledge, no machine capable of successfully addressing these unique demands of the sport of soccer has been introduced.